Marta Aleksandrowicz

Marta Aleksandrowicz received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University at Buffalo in 2022. Her dissertation undertakes an analysis of connections between recent post-socialist Eastern European and decolonial — mainly Latin American — scholarships and literatures. Specifically, her work builds on these collaborations in an attempt to re-imagine universality as a paradoxical, heterogeneous, disquieting constellation of borders and cracks between neoliberal, globalizing processes and local contexts, in which these processes are enacted and continuously transformed.

Her research and translations have been published in a variety of academic journals. She is also co-editing the issue of Penumbr(a): A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity on beauty. Her broader interests include psychoanalysis, decolonial theory and literature, aesthetics, minoritarian literature, as well as transnational, feminist and critical theory.

This project builds upon Aleksandrowicz’s research on post-socialist Eastern European and decolonial Latin American scholarships and literatures as a lens to re-think universality from the locus of disquieting and generative fragments, borders, and cracks. Neither abstract nor exclusionary, this paradoxical model of universality attempts to contest historical associations of the universal with neoliberal globalization, white Western masculinity, utopianism, and homogeneity. Thus, it creates the basis for new ethical linkages and cosmopolitan forms of transnational community and solidarity.

The project engages such a paradoxical model of universality with psychoanalysis to forge a discussion in which social and political liberation is profoundly intertwined with a personal transformation that has a crucial aesthetic and feminine dimension. The second part of the project focuses on literary works by Clarice Lispector and 2019 Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk to examine their feminine articulations of universality that emerge through a creative practice of writing from the limits of identity, consciousness, and language.